Such news and research has earned the Large Hadron Collider many fans, and one of its biggest is Sasha Mehlhase, a physicist from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen.

Mehlhase has decided to help promote the LHC to students by taking the time to recreate a 1:50 scale model of it using Lego bricks. In total he spent 81 hours creating it, which was split between 48 hours of designing the model on his laptop, and a further 33 hours putting it together.

Such a complex model required a total of 9,500 bricks and cost 2000 euro ($2600). He also required the help of his wife and some students just to sort through all the bricks and split them up. Mehlhase admits it wasn’t all fun to do, but was well worth the effort.

He’s now hoping other models will be created at different universities, but has yet to release his model data for others to use. He’d also like Lego to latch on to the idea and release an official LHC model.

I think having an official line of science-related Lego models that included the LHC would be a great idea. There’s no doubt kids would be more interested in some of our most important real-world science projects if they could build them at home. Schools would surely pick up on the idea as well. I think the models would have to be a lot less complex than this 9,500 part example, though.